Space and airborne communications and electronic warfare (EW) systems can benefit from a significant increase in data rates and coverage on the ground, in addition to an increase in the number of antenna apertures and receiver channels. Conventional front end receivers can limit the capacity in each of these areas. The front-end of a receiver for space flight communication applications can take up about 30% of the payload mass of a space communication system. A compact, low mass receiver could reduce that value or increase the capacity of the system. However, while a compact receiver is desirable, creating the compact receiver may be difficult because available components and packaging are too large and may not provide needed functionality.
For example, existing compact solutions based on electro-absorption amplitude modulators (EAMs) may be limited in gain and noise figure (NF) by the inherent gain saturation of the EAMs. Moreover, the EAM-based receivers may suffer from high insertion loss, the need for bias supply that can lead to approximately 3 dB loss, and limited optical power handling capacity (e.g., 500 mWatts). Among other limitations of the existing EAM-based compact receiver are the large number of harmonics generated, limits on the spur-free-dynamic range (SFDR) due to saturation effects, and difficulties in developments at very high frequencies (e.g., 100 GHz).